New PowerShell Cmdlets in SharePoint 2016

I finally had some time to build my first SharePoint 2016 virtual environment, using the IT Preview bits w/ SQL Server 2014. Being a PowerShell guy, one of the first things I did – after running AutoSPInstaller of course – was open up PowerShell to start exploring the module snap-in. The first thing I wanted to take a look at was the number of cmdlets, because I knew there would be at least a few more than SharePoint 2013. Of course there are! There are actually 115 new cmdlets.

How did I figure that out (aside from checking out the aforementioned MSDN link)? Simple, run:

Get-Command -Module Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell | Measure-Object

Running the above returned 825. Eight hundred and twenty five commandlets! Very cool, but now I’m curious what are some of the new nouns that we administrators can run PoSh against? Taking a quick glance through the cmdlet list on MSDN, it was pretty obvious and expected to see lots of Azure, Office 365, and Project Server.

Sure, I can see an absolute need for those things. But out of curiosity, what do we have that’s not in those categories? Here are some of the commands that I am curious about, but haven’t been able to dig into yet. Also interesting is that the Help information for the cmdlets doesn’t appear to be baked into the snap-in yet:

Copy-SPDatabase

Copy-SPSideBySideFiles

Get-SPConnectedServiceApplicationInformation

Get-SPO365LinkSettings / Set-SPO365LinkSettings

Migrate-SPDatabase

Register-SPContentDatabase

Reset-SPSites

Set-SPServer

Start-SPService / Stop-SPService

Switch-SPSitesToNewDatabase

Upgrade-SPServer

Upgrade-SPWebApplication

Out of the list above, there are some interesting capabilities. I could guess as to what some of these might do, but instead – I’ll look into them some more with a plan of updating this post with some more detail. That is of course unless Microsoft (or other community contributors) releases some Help information on them.